Film Catalogue:

Films about the Sho’ah / Holocaust

As I already wrote about in my introductory post, I’m only including films about the Holocaust which got all the way under my skin. There were a whole gaggle of films made in the nineties and noughties which were subject to quite a lot of media hype, but which missed the mark in my opinion. I’m not therefore including some well-known films like Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Life is Beautiful, among others. They’re not at all bad films, and obviously you can include them if you want. It’s a very hard subject, to state the blindingly obvious, and choosing one’s “preferred” films is a very very personal choice. There’s absolutely no reason that the films that resonate for me have to resonate with everyone else. There are also a few quite bad films about the Holocaust (looking at you, for example, The Boy In the Striped Pajamas), which only deserve mention for how badly they fail at the subject.

Not all of the films on this list are about the Holocaust itself. Three of them are about the echos of those events, which - even as the last criminals and their victims pass away - still do of course resonate in the madness of today’s Middle East. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (based on the novel of the same name) was one of the first films to investigate the dark and complex psychology of a Holocaust survivor, and I suppose one of the first that I saw as a teenager, along perhaps with Sophie’s Choice (starring Meryl Streep in one of her earlier breakout roles, I guess). I didn’t include Sophie’s Choice on the list, but again this decision is not because I thought it was a bad movie. It was just a very long time ago, and I may well include it after watching the film again.

The memories depicted in The Pawnbroker and others are cynically exploited by some (if you look at few of my posts you won’t need to try too hard to guess who I mean) to justify the worst impunity and abuse of universal human rights, but these are of course memories nonetheless which we can’t pretend to be irrelevant to the prickly psychology of Israelis as a people. Plan A is a very recently made film which surprised me with a story that I had absolutely no knowledge of. It’s the true story of a band of Holocaust survivors who organised to take systematic revenge against the German people in the years between the end of the War and the establishment of Israel. Vengeance. Sounds familiar, right? I wasn’t actually expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. Well worth checking out.

Walk On Water is the THIRD Eytan Fox film which finds itself on two lists. That guy must be onto something. Of course it’s true that every second Israeli film might somehow or other reference the Holocaust, but here once again Fox has the special knack of plugging the external issue (or rather, in this case the deeply felt historical issue) directly into contemporary Israeli existence, and that is why the film belongs on both the so-called “normal” list and this explicitly far from normal list.